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Finding vCenter Cloud Gateway Deployments in your environment

04.27.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

After publishing my recent article on how to audit vCenter Cloud Gateway and vCenter Server registrations for the vSphere+ Cloud Service, I thought it would also be useful to share some tips on how you can easily find your existing vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) deployment(s) within your environment?

You might wonder, do I not already know about my VCGW deployment(s) or for that matter any other solution that is deployed within my own infrastructure? Yes, that would ideally be the case and you should also be able to look that up in your change management database (CMDB). However, over the years in speaking to many customers and hearing about some of the requests from our field teams, I have come to learn that this nirvana state does not exist for many of our customers.

In some organizations, it has been described as the wild wild west where teams of administrators with access to their vSphere environment can deploy any number of solution without ever communicating amongst each other to organizations that provide shared infrastructure access to other small teams and/or companies with a simliar set of challenges. Net net, it is certainly possible that solutions like the VCGW gateway may have been deployed or potentially even retired but have not been removed from your environment.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere Tags // vCenter Cloud Gateway, VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation, VSAN, vSphere

Building a custom Ubuntu image using Packer Examples for VMware vSphere project

04.25.2023 by William Lam // 5 Comments

I am a HUGE fan of HashiCorp Packer and I have been using it for a number of years across many different projects including the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution. While it can certainly feel daunting at first, the same can be said for just about anything new, I typically point folks over to Ryan Johnson's fantastic Packer Examples for VMware vSphere project as a starting point, where you can find working Packer examples across a number of popular OS distributions for both Windows and Linux.

Most recently, I was helping out a few colleagues who was interested in automating the build of an Ubuntu Desktop image that could then be exported to an OVF/OVA. Of course, my recommendation was for them take a look at Ryan's project and they should be able to augment the existing Ubuntu Server 22.04 example. Interestingly enough, while I always recommend Ryan's Packer example repo, I have not personally used it myself and this is primarily due to the existing customization I have in my Packer builds which includes the use of custom OVF properties, which you can read more about HERE, HERE AND HERE.

Since I was recommending the project, I figure I should probably give it a try at least once and the Ubuntu Desktop addition should be a trivial thing to add ... right?

Ryan's project is extremely comprehensive and while things should just work if you use the default builds, but if you wish to make tweaks, I can certainly understand that you could feel overwhelmed, which is exactly how I felt when trying to figure out how to augment the existing Ubuntu Server 22.04 build.


While I do have experience in using Packer, it did take me a few attempts as I ran into some setup issues on my macOS system and just ended up deploying an Ubuntu 22.04 VM to then use as my build host. The required change to go from an Ubuntu Server to Ubuntu Desktop was minimal, you do need to understand the project layout and ultimately how the repo has been setup, which includes the use of Ansible Packer Provisioner, which was not something I had used before.

I wanted to put together this blog post, not only as a reference for myself but also for anyone who wants to start using Packer and Ryan's awesome repo but need a bit more guidance if you intend to perform further customization.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, vSphere Tags // Packer, ubuntu

vCenter Converter 6.4 Beta is now LIVE

04.19.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

To add to the exciting release week for VMware, I am happy to share that the vCenter Converter team has just released a public beta for their next upcoming 6.4 release!

If you are an existing vCenter Converter beta participant, you can head over to the vCenter Converter Beta Community https://communities.vmware.com/t5/vCenter-Converter/ct-p/5385 to download the latest release. If you wish to join the Beta program, simply register for free at https://www.vmware.com/learn/1645300_REG.html

UPDATE (05/11/23) - vCenter Converter 6.4 has officially GA'ed and can now be downloaded from HERE.

There are lots of exciting new updates with vCenter Converter 6.4 such as support for vSphere 8 and another highly requested feature is ability to convert from an Amazon EC2 instance to a vSphere-based VM! For more details, please refer to release notes which can be found HERE.

  • Added support for NVMe disk controllers
  • Added support for paravirtual SCSI disk controllers
  • Added support for virtual machine compatibility up to hardware version 20
  • Added support for VMware vCenter version 8.0 and VMware ESXi version 8.0
  • Аdded support for VMware Workstation version 17 and VMware Fusion version 13
  • Added conversion support for Amazon EC2 instances (from AWS EC2 to VMware vSphere or VMware Cloud on AWS)
  • Added conversion support for UEFI secure boot
  • Added conversion support for Microsoft VBS
  • Improved the overall security of vCenter Converter

Categories // Automation, VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere, vSphere 8.0 Tags // vCenter Converter

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box  05/15/2025
  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
  • Quick Tip - Validating Broadcom Download Token  05/01/2025
  • Supported chipsets for the USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling 04/23/2025
  • vCenter Identity Federation with Authelia 04/16/2025

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